Replay: Jane Pauley Leaves the Today Show, October 27, 1989

I have never been an early riser. Left to my own devices, I’m almost never up before 8:30 and usually not before 9. But for some reason on October 27, 1989, I was up early enough to witness the above moment in television history, and I was livid. Jane Pauley was being let go from the Today show under circumstances reportedly not quite voluntary, and the advance publicity was apparently bad enough that this public display of making nice seemed necessary.

I asked my editor if I could write an opinion piece about it, and he let me go ahead, even though I wasn’t the TV critic. The tension of the piece is that there are two somewhat inharmonious elements, not in contradiction, but existing uneasily side by side. The first element was that I was outraged that that they could get rid of Jane Pauley on what seemed to be the basis of age. If true, this was an incredible injustice. At the same time, I couldn’t quite restrain myself from observing that, even if they thought they were running a beauty pageant and not a news show, they should still keep Pauley. I found her the more attractive. I went at this the way I’d advise a journalism student, not by trying to hide the slight discord but by emphasizing it.

Anyway, I thought I would never see the above moment again — and actually I can’t quite sit through it. It still makes me cringe, even though I find some of my reaction at the time a little extreme. I got to like Bryant Gumbel, and I have nothing against Deborah Norville, though my appreciation of Jane Pauley remains undiminished all these many years later.

Speaking of years later, when I talk about turning “the dial,” that wasn’t a figure of speech in those days. Most TVs still didn’t have remotes in 1989.